Tue, 09 Aug 2011

A while ago I switched ISPs, and maintaining a lot of email addresses
got more complicated. So I decided to consolidate.

But changing your email address turns out to be tricky on some sites.
For example, on Amazon it apparently requires a phone call to customer
support (I haven't gotten around to it yet, but that's what their email
support people told me to do).

Then there's Yahoo groups. I'm in quite a few groups, so when I made the
switch, I went to groups.yahoo.com, added a valid address and made it
my primary address. Great -- thought I was done.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I hadn't been getting any mail from
a bunch of groups I used to get mail from. I went to Yahoo groups and clicked
around for five minutes trying to find something that would show me
my email addresses. Eventually I gave up on that,
went to one of the groups I hadn't been getting,
and saw a notice at the top:

The email address you are using for this group is currently bouncing.
More info here.

So naturally, I clicked on the More info here link, and got
taken to a page that said:

Groups Error: No Permission

No Permission
You do not have permission to access this page.

Gosh, that's some helpful info, Yahoo!

So how do you really change it?

There are lots of ways to get to the Yahoo Groups "Manage your email
addresses" page -- but it shows only the new address, listed as primary,
as primary, and doesn't show the old address where it's actually trying
to send all the mail. No way to delete it from there.

Now, you can Edit membership in any particular group: that shows
both the old nonworking address (with the box checked) and the new one
(check the box to change it). Great -- so I'm supposed to do that for
all 25 or so groups I'm in? Seriously?

After much searching, I finally found an old discussion thread with a
link to the
Edit my groups
page. Scroll down to the bottom and look for "Set all of the above to".

It's still not a one-step operation -- my groups are spread across three
pages and there's no "View all on one page", and each time you submit a
page, it takes you back to "View groups" mode so you have to click on
the next page, then click on "Edit groups" again. Still, it's a heck
of a lot faster than going through all the groups one by one.

In theory it's all changed now. But then, I thought that last time ...
time will tell whether the mail actually starts flowing again.

Meanwhile, Yahoo developers: you might want to take a look at that
"More info" page that just gives a permission error.